and who questioned the quality of her wit, but never one, I think, anywhere, who questioned her goodness. She wrote a novel called Calebs in Search of a Wife. Do you happen to have read it? I hardly know whether to advise it, or not; there is so much to read! But if you do, you will find most excellent English in it, and a great deal of very good preaching; and many hints about the social habits of that time -trustworthy even to the dinner hour and the lunch hour; and maxims good enough for a copy book, or a calendar; and you will findwhat you will not find in all stories nowadays -a definite beginning and a definite end. I know what you may say, if you do read it. You would say that the sermons are too long, and that the hero is a prig; and that you would never marry him if he were worth twice his fortune, and were to offer himself ten times over. Well-perhaps not; but he had a deal of money. And that book of Calebs-whatever you may choose to say of it, had a tremendous success; it ran over Europe like wildfire; was translated into French, into German, into Dutch, into Polish, and I know not what language besides; and across the Atlantic-in those colonial days, when book-shops were not, as now, at every corner-over thirty thousand copies were sold. Those of us who can remember forty and fifty years back, and who knew anything of the inner side of an old-fashioned New England homestead, must recall the saintship that invested good Mistress Hannah More! What unfailing Sunday books her books did make! and with what child-like awe we looked upon her good, kind, old, peaked face as it looked out from the frontispiecewith soberly frilled hair all about the forehead, and over this a muslin cap with huge ruffles hemming in the face, and above this circumambient ruffle and in the lee of the great puff of muslin-which gave place, I suppose, to the old lady's comb-a portentous bow, constructed of an awful quantity of ribbon and crowning that saintly, kindly, homely face of Hannah More. Do you remember-I wonder that in the early pages of "The Newcomes"-the Colonel tells Clive Newcome, how he used in his boy days to steal the reading of some of Fielding's famous novels; and how Joseph Andrews, in that forbidden series, had a very sober binding; so that his mamma, Mrs. Newcome, when she observed the boy reading it, thought-deceived by that grave binding—that the boy might be regaling himself with some work of Mistress Hannah More's; and how, under this belief, she took up the book when he had laid it by; and read and read, and flung it down all on a sudden with such a killing, scornful look at the young Colonel, as he never, never forgot in all his life. It was unfair of Thackeray to poke fun in this way at good Mistress Hannah More! We may smile at her quaintness-her primness— her starch; but there is that in her industry, her courage, her mental range, her wide Christian beneficence which we must always ven erate. We have run on so far, that we have no words to-day for the sturdy old King George. We turn him over to another chapter, when we will speak too of Sterne-whom we had almost forgotten-and of Chatterton and of some writing men who sometimes lifted up their voices in the British Parliament. I CHAPTER V HAVE spoken within the last few pages of he was kindly natured, witty, serene, with a capacity for large and enduring friendships; yet with not much beguiling warmth in him; leaving a much accredited history, and philosophical writings eminent for their ingenuity, acuteness, and subtlety. Under our larger and freer range of thinking to-day, it is hard to understand how he became such a bugbear to so many, and was so unwisely set upon with personal scourgings; even if a man's religious conclusions be all awry, we shall make them no better, nor undo them, by tying a noisy kettle of maledictions at his heels, and goading him into a yelping and maddened gallop all down the high ways. He died unmarried in 1776; his elder brother John, for some reasons of property-which he counted larger than the historian's large repute-changed his name to Home; so that there is not now in Scotland any representative of the immediate family of this Scotch metaphysician, who bears his name. I spoke of Shenstone and gave some specimens of his rhythmic and tender graces; but he never struck deeply into the poetic mine, whether of passion or of mystery. William Collins, however, did; he was not among the very foremost poets certainly, but he gave to us tingling and sonorous echoes of the great utterances of olden times, and piquant foretaste of nobler utterances that were to come. We had our little social brush with the lively and chatty "Evelina" Burney; we paid our worship at the shrine of Mistress Hannah More-and I tried hard to fix her quaint, homely, kindly figure in your gallery of literary portraits. She lived, like Mme. d'Arblay, to a very great age eighty-eight, I think, and was (with the exception of the last-named lady) the latest survivor of all those whose lives and works we have thus far made subject of comment in the present volume. And the life and works of these people about whom we have latterly spoken, have had steady parallelism-longer or shorter-with the life and reign of George III. KING GEORGE III We ought to know something of the personality of this king who came to the head of the British household while all these keen brains |